My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• Tony Fadell Is Trying to Build the iPod of Crypto: The product guru made Ledger’s new hardware wallet—a tiny vault for digital cash—flashy and fun. Plus, with this gadget you’ll never get FTX’d. (Wired)
• Bikeshare Roars Back From the Pandemic: The shared micromobility market has been resilient even as commuting patterns have shifted. But electric scooters have struggled — and costs are up for riders. (CityLab) but see The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths: Why other rich nations have surpassed the U.S. in protecting pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. (New York Times)
• Worth Magazine’s ‘Worthy 100’ In order to tackle today’s challenges, we must stand together behind basic organizing principles of unity, compassion, preservation, and equality. The entrepreneurs, philanthropists, activists, industry pioneers, and political figures featured on this list have made genuine, impactful strides toward these fundamental values as they are applied across industries. (Worth)
• Secretive Gulf Family’s $300 Billion Fortune Is About More Than Oil: The Al Nahyan family owns Manchester City Football Club, a dozen or so palaces and invested big in SpaceX and Savage X Fenty. (Bloomberg)
• The $42 Billion Question: Why Aren’t Americans Ditching Big Banks? Big banks still pay next to nothing on savings, but their customers aren’t yet moving much money to higher-yielding alternatives. (Wall Street Journal)
• JPMorgan Is Still Trying to Fix Health Care: An ambitious partnership with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway fizzled, but the biggest US bank is giving it another shot—this time on its own. (Businessweek)
• A week in the life of Vladimir Putin: Putin is often portrayed in the Western media as something of a cartoon villain. But he’s also a skillful politician who has used the state-run media, a pliant bureaucracy and brutal repression to dominate Russian politics so totally that he appears to have no significant opposition. For many in the West, he’s a figure of derision, even hatred. But at home, he retains a bedrock of popular support, even amid the Ukraine fiasco. (Washington Post)
• The Supreme Court’s Most Conservative Justices Got Outplayed on Wednesday: Great lawyering—and, surprisingly, Amy Coney Barrett—debunked a legal theory designed to subvert democracy. (Slate)
• Scientists Propose New, Faster Method of Interstellar Space Travel. “Scientists have proposed a dazzling new mission to travel to the stars that is inspired by the elegant flights of seabirds, such as albatrosses, reports a new study. The interstellar concept mission would harness shifting winds generated by the Sun in order to accelerate a spacecraft to as much as 2 percent the speed of light within two years, allowing it to soar into the vast expanse beyond our solar system.” (Vice)
• A Psychologist Spent Five Years Studying World Cup Penalty Shootouts: Every job requires performance under pressure. Here’s what everybody can learn from the most tense few minutes in sports. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Kathleen McCarthy, Global Co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate. Blackstone is the world’s largest owner of commercial real estate globally with a $565 billion portfolio and $319 billion in investor capital.
The New Geopolitics of Global Finance
Source: Council on Foreign Relations
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